Video telephones provide for a highly interactive communication experience. People can now hear and speak to each other along with seeing the facial expressions that are an important part of human communications.
One problem with video processing devices, including video telephones, is the proper lighting of the user's face. Due to the image processing at both the transmitter and receiver ends, poor lighting conditions at the transmission side can result in the user's face being heavily shadowed and distorted at the receiver side. In addition, under poor lighting conditions, image sensors tend to be noisy, and this added noise in the signal degrades the quality of the video encoding for a given bit rate, further degrading the overall video telephony experience.